"My Husband's Trying to Kill Me!": A True Story of Money, Marriage, and Murderous Intent

By Jim Schutze

From an award-winning journalist, this “grippingly suspenseful true-crime tale details the foiling of a wealthy Texan’s plot to have his wife murdered” (Publishers Weekly).

To the world, Linda DeSilva’s marriage to Robert Edelman was perfect. He was her college boyfriend turned wealthy and successful husband, and the father of her children. But what friends and family didn’t know was that the Texas real estate tycoon who set her up with a luxurious life in Dallas was also her abuser. When she asked him for a divorce, the violence against her only escalated, until the shocking moment she learned her husband had hired an assassin to take her life. 

From acclaimed journalist and author Jim Schutze, “My Husband’s Trying to Kill Me!” is the riveting true-crime account of how Linda DeSilva worked with the FBI to trap her husband before he could act on his murderous intentions—and how the sting operation nearly got her killed instead. A shocking and sensational story of a wife and mother’s escape from the marriage that went from American dream to every woman’s worst nightmare.

“Numbing.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781504081955

Jim Schutze

Jim Schutze was a journalist for the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Observer, and was the former Dallas bureau chief of the Houston Chronicle. He currently writes a column for D Magazine. Schutze has earned many honors for his writing, twice winning the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ Award for best commentary, and winning the Lincoln University’s National Unity Award three times for his writing on civil rights and racial issues. Two of his books were Edgar Allan Poe Award finalists for crime writing. In 2011, Schutze was admitted to the Texas Institute of Letters in recognition of his career as a journalist and author.  

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Marriage is like a dream: the trick is to notice when the dream changes. Linda knew she had not noticed. At some point the walls of the dream had warped and cracked, and the cracks had spouted blood. But she could not remember when the dream had changed. She sat staring at the glistening, black expanse of the plateglass window as she had all night, from the moment Ike had left her here alone in the house, alone in the woods, waiting for her killer to appear in the window. She wanted to remember all of the moments, to sort back through them like snapshots in a cardboard box. She wanted to find the moment when she should have known.

She remembered driving.

It had been white-hot outside that day. Everything at lunch had been so dark, so syrupy sweet with the scent of lilies, so very Dallas. Robert was in his element, dressed in a $1,500 suit and bragging about deals. Now outside, through the blue tint of the Cadillac windows, the vast new concrete surfaces of the city were bathed in sheeting glare. The car’s laboring air conditioner filled the interior with cold, damp air.

Robert had been happy at lunch, full of himself and charming. He had told the New York stories, how awful it was. He managed to let everyone know how much money he was making. He ate ravenously, smoked like a chimney, and, made certain he was seen by people he admired. He was in Robert Edelman heaven.

Now they were driving back to their huge house on Caruth Boulevard. They were approaching the railroad tracks, and the crossing gate was coming down to stop the traffic ahead of them. Linda was belted into the passenger seat. They both had been silent since getting into the car.

Out of the blue, Robert said: I really hate T-Ball, reopening their longstanding argument about children’s softball versus soccer.

She knew she would have to reply.

I don’t know why, she said softly. She could not give up the point, but the last thing she wanted was another fight.

You know that I want him to play soccer, Linda, he said, his voice already keening upward into an adolescent whine. I don’t understand why you have to get into it with me over these things. Jesus.

Robert, Stephen is the one who wants to play T-Ball. He likes T-Ball because his friends play T-Ball.

Well, hell, Linda, then I guess that just about settles it, doesn’t it? I mean, Goddamn, if his stupid friends play T-Ball …

Robert, I don’t want to discuss this. I want to wait and talk about it later.

The car was stopped. The crossing gate was down, holding the back of its long white arm against the faces of the traffic. The warning alarm was clanging. The inside of the car was bone-chillingly cold. Robert was still sweating heavily from his three-minute exposure to the sun waiting for the valet parker to bring the car.

Linda looked out the window absently. There was a gleaming, pearl-gray Mercedes in the next lane. At the wheel was a tall man with neatly swept white hair, in a dark blue pinstriped suit. His passenger was a woman with gray-blonde hair, wearing an off-white knit dress and two long loops of pearls.

The man’s eyes met Linda’s idle glance. His eyes were a piercing blue, his face expressionless but not slack.

The blow smashed her chin upward and simultaneously snapped her head backward against the headrest at the top of the seat. As her head rotated forward, recoiling, she saw the back of Robert’s clenched fist retracting.

Discuss it later, Robert roared, still staring straight ahead at the train, his other hand holding the wheel Goddamn you, Linda, you never, ever listen.

The bell was clanging. The fist flew back across the length of the dashboard and swung up backhanded again. The seat belt was holding her so that she could not wrench free to get out of the way. The fist cracked into her partially open mouth and sent spit flying against the window.

Her head was pressed sideways against the headrest by the second blow. She was staring out the window, through speckles of her own saliva, and she saw the man and the woman in the Mercedes staring back in horror.

Thoughts scattered through her mind. Oh, I am so sorry, she thought. I am so embarrassed. I am so sorry.

The clanging stopped. The man and the woman in the Mercedes turned slowly away and looked ahead impassively through the windshield of their own car, knitted lines of worry visible above their eyes. The Mercedes pulled away smoothly and disappeared into traffic. The Cadillac lurched ahead.

In the pre-dawn she was still awake, fully dressed, alone in the house in the woods with all of the lights blazing, still staring straight ahead. The lake materialized at last in the first light of day, just where Ike had said it would be. The outline of a cove appeared. She could see a dark bulk, moving up and down on glassy swells at the far right point of the cove. Her heart froze.

It was a small aluminum boat.

The light gathered slowly, like snow.

Two figures appeared, sitting in the boat. Two men. They were fishing. She stared at the boat and imagined what might happen next. She imagined them turning their faces toward her. She imagined that it would be Joe Masterson and Gerry Hubbell. Joe would smile and give her a thumbs up.

She imagined that it would not be Joe and Gerry. Two strangers with cruel faces would steer the boat to shore and come walking toward her with guns lifted to her face. She stared at the boat for more than forty minutes.

Finally she could see the men clearly. They were strangers. They saw her. The one in the bow leaned out over the gunwales and reeled in a wet anchor line. The other reached back over the stern and pulled the starter-cord on a small green outboard motor. The motor made a high rattling noise like an eggbeater and sent up a blue plume of exhaust. The boat swung around, its bow cutting a lacy wake in the still water, and it moved toward the house. Then the boat turned again, out into the lake. It passed around the point of the cove and disappeared. In a moment she could no longer hear it.

There was nothing for her to do but sit. There was nowhere for her to go. After a while, she returned to her memories. She tried to remember when she had first laid eyes on Robert, but she could not.

He was just there. It was at Oklahoma University. She was the darling of the music department, playing the female lead in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. The decision had already been made to take the production to Germany as a USO show. Everyone in the Oklahoma University music school talked about Linda in terms of New York and a career.

It was the summer of 1967. She and most of the cast had enrolled in summer school so they would have an excuse to stick around in Norman and make changes in the show. She never knew if the others saw the show as she did, as a platform from which they would launch their dreams. But that certainly was how Linda DeSilva viewed it.

Robert Edelman was around on the set because, in his never-ending quest to graduate, he had enrolled in a stage-lighting course—something he thought would be easy and might not require much reading. Robert was not good at heavy reading.

He fawned over her, but so did lots of boys at that point. In the boys-named-Brian department alone, she had three that year.

Here, sitting before the plate-glass window in the house in the woods, she could not quite remember their names. Brian This, Brian That, and Brian Something-or-other. She did remember they were all handsome and charming and absolutely in love with her.

Even on the University of Oklahoma’s huge campus, amid all those tens of thousands of undergraduates, Linda DeSilva was a standout. She was just under five-foot-four, with a dancer’s lithe body, honey-blonde hair, and hazel eyes that came on like neon lights when she smiled. Her face was a rare combination of beauty, intelligence, and unpretentious friendliness. Boys were always drawn to her.

But Robert emerged. He came forward somehow to the center stage of Linda’s attentions. He brought flowers to her dressing room. He was different. His manners were more formal, prouder than the good-old-boy football-jocks who seemed to think they had first call on the campus’s most desirable females. Robert was from Dallas. He drove a new white convertible his parents had given him, and he always dressed impeccably.

Her first clear memory of Robert was an ordinary moment, a moment like any other. She was downstairs in the sitting room of her dormitory, looking out through the plate-glass windows in the front of the building, just as she was staring out through this window now. Robert had called earlier and said he wanted to visit. She had said yes. Now she couldn’t remember why she said yes. Probably just to be nice.

Life was so happy that summer. She remembered it as a prolonged natural high. There were already a few students at OU who were experimenting with other kinds of highs, like marijuana and barbiturates, and of course there were many students who drank heavily. All of that was out of the question for Linda, given her strict upbringing in Duncan, Oklahoma, but it was also unnecessary and irrelevant. Life itself was so very sweet and so very exciting that summer. She could not imagine wanting life to be any different from what it already was.

And then Robert appeared. He was walking up the hill from the parking lot toward the dorm. The sun fell on his beautiful black hair. Robert, dressed in a black cashmere V-neck sweater and gray flannel trousers, was handsome, tall and imposing, and he moved regally. That was the first moment. She looked out at him from the window of the dorm, and there was an audible ping in her heart.

Sitting here now, she could not repress a little smile. How could she not have seen what Robert represented to her in that moment? Given her family’s house full of Disney books, Disney records, Disney sheet music; given the fact she could sing the entire score of  Snow White by age eight and that one of her sustaining dreams in life was to sing a role in a Disney movie; how could she have sat there in the dorm in Norman looking out at that tall, dark, handsome, impeccable young man striding up the hill to her and have failed to understand that, in that moment and in her young eyes, he was Prince Charming?

She did not know him. She did not know anything about him. From what little she had seen, he was completely unlike her. She was sunny, optimistic, trusting, outgoing, and sure of herself. Robert was brooding, dark, reclusive, and a little paranoid.

But she was twenty-one years old that summer, and life was spinning by in a beautiful dream. Perhaps some people might have found her childhood in Duncan narrow. But for her it had been snug, safe, reassuring, and happy. Duncan was a prosperous town of the Oklahoma oil patch, with pretty new houses on neatly kept streets. Her mother had arranged private lessons for Linda and her younger sister, Miriam, and had driven both girls to the voice, piano, and dance teachers who would prepare them for life on a grander stage.

Her brief courtship with Robert took place at a moment in her life when it seemed as if that larger stage might already be beckoning. The USO Tour in October and December of 1967 was a huge success at each of its stops, with standing ovations and many curtain calls, especially for Linda.

When Linda and the company arrived at each hotel on the itinerary, there was always a call waiting from Robert. In their long and very expensive transatlantic telephone conversations, this boy who had only known Linda a matter of months told her again and again: You are the only person in the entire world who cares about me. You are the only one I have. I never had anything of my own before.

The tour was thrilling, but she was also extremely homesick. By the time she returned, she and Robert had already vowed by telephone that they would get married the following June.

Both families had reservations. There was the religious difference: Robert was a Jew, and Linda was a Christian. The parents had barely met, let alone gotten to know each other. Linda was open and cheerful with Roberts parents, but Robert was aloof in the extreme with her parents.

Linda’s bright, shy younger sister, Miriam, had more pointed doubts about Robert. Miriam, who was also a student at OU, had run into Robert when Linda was not around. She found him to be cold, arrogant, even mean-spirited.

But it was also clear to everyone else that these two attractive and willful young people intended to take their newly earned freedom as adults and do what they wanted, which was to marry. Both families decided to make the best of the bargain, and in June of 1968, in a ceremony in Linda’s parents’ home, they were wed.

They immediately moved to Dallas, where Linda acquired an Actors’ Equity card for the first time in her life. She quickly landed a job with the Dallas Summer Musicals—road productions of recent Broadway hits, featuring the New York stars and local supporting casts.

Robert made money right away. He went to work selling computers—then a new field—and took to it like a bird to air. Then one night toward the end of that first summer of marriage, Robert came home with exciting news. He had been offered a job selling computer hardware and software for Honeywell in New York.

So what are we going to do? she asked.

What do you mean, ‘what?’ We’re going to New York. What the fuck do you think we’re going to do, Linda?

The moment the Summer Musicals season ended, Linda began to pack. Her mother was delighted. Never shy about pressing an advantage for her daughter, Virginia DeSilva wrote to the mother of the famous soprano Beverly Sills and told her that her daughter Linda, a soprano, was coming to New York to live and needed to find a good voice teacher. Sills herself sent a personal letter back promptly, telling Mrs. DeSilva that her own teacher, Estelle Leibling, would give Linda an audition when she arrived in the city.

This is so exciting, she said.

Yeah, Robert said, maybe now we’re going to make it.

Linda and Robert, still in their early twenties, loaded up everything they owned in a U-Haul trailer and drove straight to Manhattan. They checked into the Howard Johnson’s Hotel on Eighth Avenue, between Fifty-second and Fifty-third Streets, installed Linda’s orange tabby cat, Dallas, in the room, and walked out to see the city.

Even at dusk the sidewalks were packed with people; the tops of the tall buildings spun around their heads like a roller coaster; taxicab horns honked out a rhythm; the sidewalks were awash in faces and feet. They found a coffee shop with a window, and they sat and gazed in absolute awe at the city. They were there.

The next day they set out on foot to hunt for a place to live. Robert picked several buildings by sight, choosing the largest, fanciest-looking places he could find.

I don’t want to live anywhere where they don’t have an awning and a doorman, he said.

They were shown apartments in some of the expensive buildings where they inquired. The rents were more per month than they could afford to pay in a year.

I believe, one rental agent said, that you are looking considerably outside the range of what you can afford.

Some of the rental agents gave them advice about where they needed to be looking. They eventually found themselves in the Forest Hills section of Queens, with an impatient landlord standing in his T-shirt in the doorway behind them while they inspected what they could afford—a tiny one-room apartment with heavily scarred walls and an ancient all-gas alcove kitchen. After paying the first and last months’ rent and a damage deposit, they were close to broke. They set up housekeeping with a television set on a metal folding tray, a card table, two chairs, a bed, and the cat.

Linda went to see Estelle Leibling the following Monday. Leibling was a powerful woman, then in her eighties, who lived in a beautiful apartment off Central Park just around the corner from the Plaza Hotel. She sat on a bench before a grand piano covered with an elegant silk scarf while Linda sang.

The old lady listened carefully, barely nodding her head while Linda worked her way through passages from La Traviata. Finally she said, You have a beautiful voice, my dear.

Thank you, Miss Leibling. I know that I still have much to learn.

I will be very happy to teach you.

Linda was thrilled. I am so honored, she said.

Good. I will write you your own cadenza, and we will work from that.

Linda studied with Leibling for six months. The lessons gave her barely enough confidence to carry her through the round of auditions she was making in the city, none of which were going especially well.

Robert’s own relationship with New York was bumpy. The men he worked with at Honeywell were sharp, tough, fast-moving, and seemed to know everything there was to know about the computer business and about selling. Robert learned a lot about computers from them, but the part he soaked up like a sponge was the selling and the dealing. That part of it—the attitude and the rhythms, the push and the shove, the patience, the coaxing, and the timing that went into closing a deal—that part was elixir to Robert. He drank it down with an unquenchable thirst.

Robert and Linda socialized in the evenings with the Honeywell people and the people with whom Robert was doing business, but not with the theater people Linda was meeting. Roberts business acquaintances in New York were hard-driving and hard-drinking. It was an eye-opening experience for a girl from Duncan, Oklahoma. In fact, it was pretty bracing for a boy from North Dallas, too. Robert had never been much of a drinker. He would much rather lie in his own bed and talk to people on the telephone than sit around a table talking person-to-person for hours on end. But as long as the core of the conversation was about business, he could make himself do it, and he expected Linda to do it with him.

She’s great, a drunk associate said one night in a bar, leering across the booth at Linda. You got a great wife, Edelman.

Yeah, he said. Isn’t she pretty? When I found her in Oklahoma, she was barefoot and sassy. Now she sings opera with Beverly Sills.

There were some aspects of life in New York to which Robert was absolutely impervious. On the first Monday, when he was to report for work in Manhattan, Robert walked down the staircase into a subway station in Queens, looked around, climbed back up out of the station, returned to the apartment, and told Linda to get the car and drive him to work.

I am not going to ride with those people, he said. Ever.

They had planned on getting rid of their car, since keeping a car garaged in New York was so horribly expensive, but it was clear from that moment on that they would be keeping the car. Every single working day from that time forward, when the rush-hour buses and cabs and limousines poured into Manhattan in the morning and out again in the evening, there in the middle of them all was little Linda DeSilva, fighting her way through traffic in order to drop her husband off for work and pick him up again at the end of the day.

It was a long grueling drive. Of all the people at Honeywell, including the very top management, Robert Edelman was the only person whose wife dropped him off and picked him up every day as if he were commuting the ten minutes that it takes to get from North Dallas to downtown Dallas. But Robert had no intention of allowing it to be any other way, and by now Linda knew not to cross him on certain matters.

New York was a hard life for both of them. Linda was accustomed to seeing her family at least every month, or so, and she missed them with an aching heart. Robert talked on a Honeywell WATS line to his own mother in Dallas every day, sometimes more than once a day, often fighting with her, but he nevertheless missed being home. He was learning a lot in New York, but it was in Dallas, where he had grown up an average kid from a normal family, that Robert yearned to shine. Even if he made some kind of a hit in New York, it would never be as sweet, because there was nobody in New York he had always wanted to impress.

One night in the fall of 1970, just after Linda and Robert had come in from their daily motorcross trip from Manhattan, the phone rang. It was Linda’s mother with exciting news! The DeSilvas were coming, bringing Miriam, Linda’s beloved Aunt Ruth, and the family dog. They knew their girl was lonely. When Linda hung up, there were tears of joy in her eyes.

What is it? Robert asked warily. Was that your mother? What did she tell you?

Oh Robert, she said. I’m so happy. They’re coming. In a couple of weeks they’ll be here. My whole family is coming to visit us. They’re even bringing the dog.

Robert had his back to her. He was looking out a window that opened on a sooty little balcony. His massive back blocked out the light from the window, so that Linda could see him only in a blackened silhouette. When he turned around to face her, his eyes were bulging, and his face was purple and knotted with veins. His mouth clenched and twitched several times before he could spit out his words.

The hell they are he roared at last. What the fuck do you mean, Linda, your Goddamn parents are coming here with half of your relatives and the Goddamn dog? Did you even think to ask me about this before you told them to fucking just come right on and move in on us?

I didn’t tell them … she began to say.

Robert was moving toward her. His eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of his skull. Linda had often seen Robert angry, but she had never seen him like this. She wondered if there was something wrong, if he might be ill or in pain. He was swinging massive balled fists at his side.

Robert, she said softly.

The blow came straight on, like a boxer’s punch. It exploded into her jaw and hurled her backward. The back of her head cracked against the wall. She slid down the wall, foggy, uncomprehending at first, her face throbbing and crisscrossed by lightning bolts of pain. She collapsed on the floor and tried to call out. Saliva and blood dribbled from her mouth but the only sound she produced was an inchoate grunting.

Her jaw would not move. At first she thought he had knocked it apart somehow, that it was dislocated, broken. Horror raced deep into her soul. She thought of her voice.

Robert was kneeling in front of her. Oh, Linda, he said. Linda, oh my Linda. Oh my Linda, what have I done, Linda. He reached forward. She flinched away, but he took her arms firmly in his huge hands. Oh Linda, Linda, I am so sorry. I just … I don’t know what came over me, baby. Oh my baby, I am so sorry.

She felt as if she were no longer inside her own body. She was apart, at a distance from what was happening. It was almost as if she were standing on the other side of the room and could see herself sitting slumped on the floor with her mouth open and saliva drooling out, Robert kneeling before her, holding her elbows and speaking into her face so intensely and deliberately. In a strange way, the sense of being outside herself allowed her a measure of control and calm. She could appraise what was happening to her, as if she were a stranger who had happened onto this scene by accident. Robert kept asking her if she could close her mouth, and she kept nodding no.

Can you get up? he asked.

She stared at him, then pushed his hands away from her arms and lifted herself to her feet.

Are you all right?

She looked away dreamily, not quite able to formulate an answer. Her jaw was throbbing. It felt unhinged and thick. Her tongue lay in her mouth at an odd angle.

A dislocated jaw, she thought. He hit me in the face, and I have a dislocated jaw. If they can put it back in place, my face will still be whole.

Linda, Robert said, I am going to drive you straight to an emergency room.

As soon as they were moving in the light evening traffic, Robert began talking. "We have a lot of problems to get through, Linda. I know that. New York has been rough on both of us. It hasn’t turned out to be your dream. I know that’s hard for you. I know you had stars in your eyes.

"I’ve done okay, but I hate the life. We live like beggars. I can’t stand that. It makes me feel cheap and poor. I know there has been a lot of tension building up. I feel so terrible, baby. I wish. … I just feel so bad about this.

"Maybe we can go home. Maybe we should just go back. The life is so much better in Dallas. I’ve learned a lot here. I could make this same money or better back there, and think how much farther it would go. Here, we live like peasants. Back home, we’d live like kings on this money.

I know you counted on this a lot for your career. But maybe you’re ready to face reality and see that it just wasn’t in the cards for you. Maybe not. We don’t have to go back. Oh, Linda …

A deep wracking sob welled up out of him. He began sobbing in waves that shook his entire upper body. His face was shimmering with a solid sheet of tears. Oh baby, I’m so sorry.

He reached over with his right hand and squeezed it around the long fingers of her left hand. She allowed his hand to stay there.

You know, Linda, he said, snorting back the remaining tears and wiping his nose on his shoulder, "if you tell them I hit you, they will take me to jail. And I know you probably think that’s just what I deserve. I probably do deserve it. But if they do that, it’s just going to be that much harder to get everything straightened out.

"I will lose my job, and we’ll have to pay a lawyer and everything. I don’t know what will happen. We’ll be screwed, that’s all. Then we’ll really be screwed.

"I want to work all this out. I love you more than life itself, baby. I want us to stay together and work everything out. But in order to do that, we’ve got to have a … if they even see you like this, they’re going to think I popped you. They’ll just leap to that assumption, you watch. And they’ll ask. You know, shit, it’s New York, they probably have some kind of truth squad just hovering right there in the emergency room waiting for this kind of shit.

Linda, I think you should just tell them you were taking a shower in the bathtub, standing up, and you lost your footing and came down on the faucet.

He drove on in silence for a half block or so. She could see the neon sign of the hospital over the roof line of the next block.

Can you do that?

She nodded yes.

You were taking a shower, right?

She nodded yes.

You reached back to get the soap. You reached back to get the soap, right, baby?

She nodded yes.

And you lost your footing, and I came running, and the next thing you knew you were sitting on the floor, and you couldn’t close your mouth. Right?

She nodded yes.

It’s right here. You’re going to be all right, Linda. I’m going to take care of you. From now on, our lives are going to be very different. We’re going to be happy again.

They were at the door. An orderly reached down and opened the passenger door of the car to help Linda out. Robert was standing outside the car next to the engine, looking across the hood at her as the orderly helped her toward the emergency room door.

I have to go park. Are you all right? Linda? Are you going to be all right, Linda?

There in the cabin by the lake, she could not remember anything after those words. She could see Robert saying them. Are you going to be all right, Linda? Are you going to be all right, Linda? But the scene stopped there.

Are you going to be all right?

The words ran slowly through her mind. She sat very quietly on the sofa in the house by the lake. It was very still in the house. All of a sudden she could not move. She felt her breath rise up high in her throat, and she was paralyzed by fear. She had an overwhelming sense that something was alive in the darkness on the other side of the plate-glass window.

Someone. Someone watching.

She squeezed her hands into fists and forced the fear away. The house seemed to squeeze in around her. The air felt thick and close. She ordered herself to get up and pour a glass of water. She did it.

With the glass in hand, she stood in the kitchen, staring at the pattern in the tiled floor. She reached back into her game of memories to see where she had left off.

Going back to Dallas in 1970 was a blur. Linda was rehired immediately by the Summer Musicals, and Robert went to work for the local Honeywell office.

It was a strange time in Dallas. Other parts of the country, especially the Northeast and the Great Lakes industrial region, were headed into a long, rusty economic depression. But rising prices and shortages of Arab oil had conspired with a boom in the Texas oil fields to make the economy in Dallas brilliant.

Everyone in Dallas who had anything to sell was beginning to make money. There was a sense of optimism, excitement, and even a feeling of superiority, as if the North had earned its troubles by being too soft on unions, too old, too weak.

When politicians in the North complained that Texas was taking advantage of the oil embargo to gouge on heating oil prices, the Dallas radio stations began playing a locally produced satirical song called Freeze a Yankee. Judging by his gleeful chortles, Robert Edelman was the song’s greatest fan.

One day in 1972, Robert came home from a business lunch full of excitement and ideas: one of the men at lunch had said the Dallas banks were chock full of money from the oil boom and didn’t know where to invest it. Meanwhile, so many people were moving to Dallas that there was a serious housing shortage. If you walked into any one of the big banks downtown and said you wanted some money to build houses with for resale, the bankers practically kissed you on the cheek.

A week later he tried it. He came away with a bridge loan to cover the cost of a large lot in North Dallas and the construction of a new house.

Almost before he could get the house completed, it sold at a substantial profit. Robert went back to the bank for more money. He was now a real estate developer.

He did well, and quickly. Almost everyone else who was building houses in Dallas did well during that period, too, but Robert did better than many. He had a good eye for locations.

His own ambition, if he and Linda ever built a house for themselves, would be to build one in the Park Cities—two island enclave communities called University Park and Highland Park, totally surrounded by Dallas proper. The Park Cities area was where Dallas’s old-money elite lived.

But Robert understood that the new people flooding into Dallas wanted new-new-new—brand-new houses on brand-new tree-barren streets, with new shopping centers and new schools nearby. Robert gave them what they wanted, and they bought his houses as fast as he could put them up. By late 1972, Robert had left his job as a computer salesman and now introduced himself to people as a developer.

Linda noticed that the whininess and the crankiness seemed to be leaving Robert, at least when he was in public, supplanted by a cocksure arrogance. He took to holding his cigarettes with his forefinger and thumb, leaving his little finger crooked and aloft in a puffy little